Early African American Literature Research Articles

Olaudah Equiano's Ecclesial World

This paper argues that Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative refashions and redeploys an eighteenth-century evangelical discourse of "primitive Christianity" in order to advocate for the end of the slave trade and the creation of an inclusive community at once British, Christian, and African. While studies of the origin of early African American literature have recognized the complex role that evangelical Christianity plays in eighteenth-century transatlantic black writing, this article shifts the focus to ecclesiology specifically, highlighting the way that Equiano grounds his appeal in contemporary thinking about the nature and purpose of religious institutions. Inspired by an evangelical preoccupation with the New Testament book of Acts, Equiano points to a diasporic first-century Christian church as a model of justice, generosity, and racial harmony. In this way, he condemns the exploitation and abuse of the transatlantic slave system and posits that a spiritual kinship that transcends racial difference should serve as the foundation of reform.

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires

Reviewed by: The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires Peter Wirzbicki (bio) Keywords Print culture, Citizenship, African American thinkers, Political theory, Literary analysis The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. By Derrick R. Spires. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 314. Cloth, $49.95.) Derrick Spires, an associate professor of English at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, wrote The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States in part to respond to the sense that discussions about print culture, the public sphere, and democratic deliberation had left out black participants and visions. The resulting work, though, is far more interesting than if Spires simply had applied the theories of Jürgen Habermas or others to early African American literature. Instead he develops his own theory of how black thinkers and writers developed what he calls a "practice of citizenship." Scholars working on black radicalism, American print culture, and antebellum politics will find this a provocative and fruitful read. The book uses a rich diversity of sources, a wide array of theoretical perspectives from [End Page 379] contemporary critical theory, and close readings of both well-known and sometimes unfamiliar sources to establish that antebellum black thinkers were developing novel ways to think about power and citizenship through engagement with a literary public sphere. At the center of Spires's argument is a convincing and important re-theorization of citizenship. Black thinkers and activists in the antebellum period—men and women like Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, James McCune Smith, William J. Wilson, Francis Watkins Harper, and many others—conceived of citizenship, he argues, less as a formal legal right defined by the state and more as a practice, something that is produced through energetic and engaged political activism, especially through an assertive print culture. Black thinkers conceived of citizenship as what you do, in other words, not who you are or how the state sees you. By adding a valuable literary-studies perspective to such recent historiographical studies of the history of citizenship by legal historians like Barbara Welke and Martha Jones, Spires's work shows how the creation of citizenship was a cultural and literary project as much as a political one. The black press plays a central role in this construction of citizenship. Spires sees the emergence of a black print culture as a central "space" in which "black writers constituted community outside of the nation-state form" (9). It was in pamphlets, newspapers, and short fiction that black writers theorized these new practices of citizenship. He begins in the immediate post-revolutionary period with an analysis and discussion of the "neighborly" ethos that black Philadelphians preached in the wake of the famous yellow-fever epidemic of 1793. Spires argues that black Philadelphians sought to mobilize under the hegemonic banner of civil republicanism while simultaneously expanding this notion of civic virtue by incorporating "neighborliness," a trait that had a "more democratic ethos of equality and inclusion" than white thinkers tended to (56). The relatively restrained and deferential citizenship of Jones and Allen is soon supplanted by the more assertive "circulating" citizenship of the Colored Convention movement. Spires shows how accounts of these conventions were meant to be printed and published, "circulating" well beyond their immediate contexts. Historians may be interested in how Spires centers debates about state citizenship, in contrast to some historiographical interpretations that have tended to focus on the creation of [End Page 380] national citizenship. Black thinkers also increasingly engaged with questions about "economic citizenship." Spires discusses debates between William J. Wilson and James McCune Smith about "black aristocracy" and the "best average colored citizen" (143). Together, Spires shows that a rich and vibrant debate about the meaning of republicanism, market life, and economic citizenship occurred in the black press. Next, Spires turns his attention to "critical citizenship," especially as modeled by the briefly lived Anglo-African Magazine. For Spires, "critical citizenship" disrupts and unsettles otherwise fixed and unified norms of white supremacy and white citizenship. Critical citizenship is "intrusive"; it invades the settled spaces of white politics that seek to...

Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical CultureThe Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation

Black Print Unbound: The <i>Christian Recorder</i>, African American Literature, and Periodical CultureThe Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation

Are We Reading the Right Clotel(le)? Revolutions in Early African American Literature

Are We Reading the Right Clotel(le)? Revolutions in Early African American Literature

The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine

Reviewed by: The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine Manisha Sinha The Lives of Frederick Douglass. Robert S. Levine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-674-05581-0, 373 pp., cloth, $29.95 One of the foremost scholars of early African American literature, Robert S. Levine, has written a nuanced and careful analysis of Frederick Douglass's iconic autobiographies or, as he calls it, Douglass's many lives. The introduction, a survey of the historical literature and the publication histories of Douglass's autobiographies, is in itself worth the price of entrance. Levine not only delineates the content of these books, comparing them with Douglass's contemporaneous speeches and letters, but also frames his book around Douglass's relationship with pivotal figures of his times, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and his erstwhile master, Thomas Auld. The result is a book that explodes conventional wisdom on not just Douglass but also his fraught relationships with these men. In perhaps one of the most original chapters of the book, Levine argues that the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass's first autobiography, published in 1845, was the product of a close collaboration between Garrisonian abolitionists and Douglass. Dispensing with the tired argument that white abolitionists simply co-opted the stories of fugitive slaves, Levine reveals the manner in which Garrison's introduction resonates with themes in Douglass's narrative. He provocatively designates the narrative the "Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Narrative." Douglass was of course a star lecturing agent of the [End Page 206] society and, as Levine acknowledges, perfected the telling of his autobiography on the lecture circuit before he put pen to paper. Levine challenges Douglass's later claim that Garrisonians insisted that he only tell his story and restrict his analysis of slavery. But according to him, Douglass reclaimed his narrative when he published it in two editions in Ireland with the help of the Irish abolitionist Richard Webb. This argument may be overstated, considering that Webb, who ushered the Dublin editions of the Narrative into production, was a staunch Garrisonian and not very fond of Douglass. And most of the changes in the Narrative were designed to appeal to an English market, though clearly Douglass's tour abroad, as most of his biographers have noted, helped him to emerge as an independent abolitionist leader. Levine reads Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, published after his rancorous break with Garrison, in light of his novella The Heroic Slave. The novella was based on the 1841 shipboard slave revolt on the Creole led by Madison Washington. Levine deftly illustrates how the figures of Washington and Douglass himself merge in his writings. This iteration of Douglass's life story, Levine contends, marks his emergence not only as a political abolitionist but also as one who discards Garrisonian moral suasion for a more resistant posture against slavery. But Garrison, as Levine also shows, never hesitated to justify slave resistance and rebellion, despite his formal commitment to nonviolence. While James McCune Smith's introduction to the new autobiography evokes black artistry and depicts Douglass as the representative black man, Douglass's effusive dedication to Gerrit Smith, which Levine reproduces, reveals that interracialism or building alliances with whites remains important for Douglass. It is somewhat surprising then that Levine does not examine Douglass's relationship with Smith, which John Stauffer sees as pivotal in his book The Black Hearts of Men. Levine's earlier volume on the relationship between Douglass and Martin Delany, the black emigrationist, is one of the best on the subject. Levine does spend considerable time on Douglass's relationship with two major white figures, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. He convincingly reveals that until the end of his life Douglass saw Brown and the abolitionists as more heroic figures than the Great Emancipator. Levine argues for Douglass's changing evaluations of Lincoln, from harsh critic to one who sought to use the mantle of Lincoln for the continuing struggle for black rights. Levine is particularly good at comparing Douglass's contemporary [End Page 207] criticisms of the president with his retrospective accounts of his meetings with Lincoln in...

Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature by Reginald A. Wilburn (review)

Reviewed by: Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature by Reginald A. Wilburn Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy PREACHING THE GOSPEL OF BLACK REVOLT: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature. By Reginald A. Wilburn. Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press. 2014. Wilburn’s book sets out to explore a previously neglected area, Milton’s impact on early African-American literature. Like the British Romantics before them, nineteenth-century African American writers embraced Milton as a pioneer of liberty, and used him for their own political purposes, while simultaneously appealing to his position in the literary canon for validation. The book is divided into a theoretical first chapter, followed by chapters on Phillis Wheatley, early black orators and pamphleteers, Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen [End Page 159] Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Sutton E. Griggs, and an epilogue on Malcolm X. In conjunction with his Christian ethos, Milton’s poetry becomes an inspiration for these black writers who “recognized freedom and its pursuit as a political ministry divinely sanctioned by God” (16). Wilburn is strictly interested in the type of intertextuality that designates “the semantic and cultural presupposition that lie between two texts and allow both of them to have the meaning that they do” (172). This theoretical statement is important to keep in mind, given the dearth of textual evidence in this 392-page book. In most cases, the authors never mentioned Milton in their writings, and they may or may not have encountered his work directly. Yet, Wilburn finds Milton’s influence everywhere: in the texts’ formal and rhetorical choices, specific turns of phrase, or overall tenor. Thus, Chapter Two discovers “traces of Miltonic presence” in Phillis Wheatley’s use of blank verse in her elegies (60). Chapter Three claims that early African-American orators and pamphleteers “specifically structured their orations with Milton in mind” (137) in their black jeremiads. Chapter Four discusses Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography, arguing that Douglass’s fragmentary encounter with Book 6 of Paradise Lost reproduced in a primer the abolitionist read, is bound to have shaped the writer’s style in delivering his subsequent anti-slavery messages (158). Even the lack of any reference to Milton in a text becomes a submerged Miltonic presence. In Chapter Five, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper is said to signal Milton’s influence on her work by choosing to publish Moses (1869) in a two-text format. At the same time, her idiosyncratic use of blank verse stands for Harper’s “wayward or demonic approach to Miltonic engagement” (199) and artistic independence from Milton’s authority. In the first chapter, Wilburn argues that it is impossible for any post-Miltonic English-language poet to refer to Satan without implicitly referring to Milton (50). Consequently, all literary references to Satan, hell, or revolt are read as intentional, overt engagements with the poet. Chapter Six deals with Anna Julia Cooper’s feminist critique of patriarchy, which appropriates Milton by sharing his demonic revolt against authority (236). Similarly, in Chapter Seven, Sutton E. Griggs’s black nationalism in Imperium in Imperio (1899) “instantly invites an intertextual association with Milton” in their shared “themes of subterranean rebellion and liberty” (291). Furthermore, given Imperium’s indebtedness to Thomas Jefferson’s political philosophies and Jefferson’s own debt to Milton’s ideas on liberty, Griggs becomes “a Miltonic heir by intertextual default” (283). The epilogue analyzes the Miltonian influence in Malcom X’s articulation of black nationalism. Given his conversion to Islam, X reads Milton’s biblical symbolism from outside the Christian tradition and self-consciously identifies with Satan’s radical energies in Paradise Lost in his scathing critique of racial inequality in the U.S. As Wilburn puts it, “Unlike Milton, Malcolm is of the devil’s party and he knows it” (328). Wilburn accomplishes what he set out to do, in as much as he firmly situates early African-American writers within the framework of English literature. His book convincingly illuminates the stylistic, thematic, and rhetorical affinities of early African-American writing with the larger English literary tradition, as well as the writers’ own agency in making this tradition their own. Unfortunately, this important and fascinating story often gets obscured...

Rethinking the Black Atlantic: Gallows Literature, Slave Narratives, and Visual Culture

Rethinking the Black AtlanticGallows Literature, Slave Narratives, and Visual Culture Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity Jeannine Marie DeLombard Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012 446pp. Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas Edited by Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014 239pp. Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century Jasmine Nichole Cobb New York: New York University Press, 2015 264pp. While it has been twenty-three years since Paul Gilroy published The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), it remains a touch-stone in studies of the African diaspora. Three recent works, Jeannine Marie DeLombard’s In the Shadow of the Gallows, Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth’s edited collection Journeys of the Slave Narrative, and Jasmine Nichole Cobb’s Picture Freedom, all engage with Gilroy’s work and offer fresh perspectives on textual productions by and about people of African descent in the Atlantic world, particularly as they speak to issues of race, subjectivity, and political and social belonging. DeLombard highlights the ways in which Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic” led to the formation of the canon of early Afro-diasporic literatures that we know today, including such figures as Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Venture Smith, [End Page 683] and many others.1 This vein of scholarship, she argues, has “entrenched the Afro-diasporic canon’s foundations ever more deeply in masculinist life-writing, [but] it has ignored arguably the most widely circulated, influential form of early black personal narrative, the criminal confession” (12–13). It is this gap that DeLombard addresses in her fascinating study of “gallows literature” and the criminal confession. Aljoe’s introduction opens with a discussion of Gilroy’s concept of the slave ship as a “chronotope” and Marcus Rediker’s analysis of the actual ships that participated in the slave trade, many of which were refurbished vessels that had originally pursued other enterprises. Journeys of the Slave Narrative, which features essays on works from North America, South and Latin America, and the Caribbean, is informed by Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic and by Rediker’s characterization of the slave ship (which functions as a counterpoint to Gilroy’s chronotope). In advancing the volume’s argument for a more capacious definition of the “slave narrative,” Aljoe offers a compelling reading of Rediker’s vision of the slave ship—a blend of different materials and purposes from around the Creole Atlantic—as a metaphor for the early narratives on which the collections’ authors focus. Cobb also draws on Gilroy’s discussion of the slave ship, describing the “transatlantic parlor” as another “single, complex unit of analysis” of the African experience in the Atlantic world (Gilroy qtd. in Cobb 17). Gilroy’s ship provides both a critical model and a point of contrast for Cobb’s own exploration of the ways in which black freedom was “domesticated” through the use of visual images. Informed by Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic and the expanded literary canon that his work made possible, DeLombard, Aljoe and Finseth, and Cobb offer fresh perspectives on early African American literature and culture and pressure familiar understandings of genre and temporality. At a basic level, these three works share a concern with representations of the freedom and unfreedom of people of African descent and devote significant attention to African Americans. The work of DeLombard, Cobb, and the authors featured in Aljoe and Finseth’s collection of essays testifies to the range of critical approaches that can be brought to bear on African diasporic literatures and early American studies, including law and literature, critical race theory, Marxism, feminism, transnationalism and hemispheric studies, food studies, intellectual history, visual theory, and so forth. They also complicate and extend what we understand as African American literature—moving beyond first-person narratives of the journey [End Page 684] from slavery to freedom to include texts such as criminal confessions, ship’s logs, and lithographs. In so doing, these three works also turn away from the search for an “authentic” black voice—with DeLombard noting the distinction between “writers of...

Maria W. Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life”: Black Girlhood in theRepository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art

“The First Stage of Life” (1861) is a six-page short story by Maria W. Stewart, African American woman writer, orator, and activist. It is serialized in three parts in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art in April, July, and October 1861. From 1858 to 1863, the Repository was a black magazine administered by black men and designed for black readers. It was based in Indianapolis, and in 1861 its chief editor was John Mifflin Brown. Published quarterly with each edition containing just over twenty bound pages of poems, parables, and essays, the magazine attracted black households with rising amounts of disposable income and leisure time. Today, the Repository is a non-circulating, non-digitized, rare black magazine on microfilm at the Indiana State Library with one extant issue housed in Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Stewart’s serialized story about a black girl’s coming-of-age published in an early black magazine broadens the contributions African American women have made to nineteenth-century print culture, and her early emphasis on black girlhood invites further study on the methodologies, frameworks, and emerging trends that continue to shape the canon of early African American literature and print culture. This article explores what we gain by examining the intersection of black girlhood and black print culture studies. To define black girlhood, nineteenth-century African American women writers distinguish between youthful and knowing girlhood, a demarcation that is represented by a black girl’s age and offers rhetorical advantages for race activists. Identifying black girls as youthful and therefore childlike removes sexual suggestion from their bodies. The growth from youthful to prematurely knowing girlhood occurs when black girls gain a deepened awareness of their precarious positions and seek methods for their survival. To emphasize a black girl’s age as a textual marker recognizes that, similar to all women, black women in the antebellum period experience a youthful period and undergo distinct stages of growth and maturity into

Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature. Reginald A. Wilburn. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+392.

<i>Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature</i>. Reginald A. Wilburn. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+392.

Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature. Reginald A. Wilburn. Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014. xiii + 392 pp. $58.

Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature. Reginald A. Wilburn. Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014. xiii + 392 pp. $58.

A Silent Book, Some Kisses, and John Marrant's &lt;em&gt;Narrative&lt;/em&gt;

The book-often a Bible or prayer book-never speaks. Despite its silence, scholars call it a strangely insistent metaphor, a curious image and the first repeated and revised trope of tradition, first trope to be Signified upon.1 Found in several early African American narratives, talking book generally describes a scene in which an individual (traditionally, an African slave) spies his master reading a book.2 The sight produces a desire to hear text speak, but upon touching book-either in form of placing one's ear or lips to text-it remains silent.3 In his 1774 Narrative, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw offers this account:And when first I saw [my master] read, I never so surprised in my whole life when I saw book talk to my master; for I thought it did, I observed him to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so to me. . . . I follow'd him to place where he put book, being mightily delighted with it, and when nobody saw me, I open'd it and put my ear down close upon it, in great hope that it would say something to me but very sorry and greatly disappointed when I found it would not speak.4According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gronniosaw remembers a failed conversation between an eager listener and a prayer book that refuses to speak. This refusal denies very possibility of literacy, the ultimate parameter by which to measure humanity of authors struggling to define an African self in Western letters.5 This silence ensures that Gronniosaw has no access to any proper measure of humanity. Yet, silence begets a response-namely, a call for revision to which John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, John Jea, and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano respond.6Gates's reading of this curious sight privileges a desire-imagined a longing that seeks satisfaction-for literacy. When book does not talk, this unsatisfied desire mobilizes revisionism that marks, according to Gates, beginning of an African American literary tradition. Moreover, Gronniosaw, a first, collectivizes a way of being-that is, possessing an inability to hear book his master does-which is mediated through a feeling of suffering; he writes of his displeasure, I was very sorry and greatly disappointed when I found [the book] would not speak.7 In Gates's reading, when John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and John Jea revise Gronniosaw's words, they reproduce this suffering and in so doing participate in a collective experience of embodied and ontological suffering or race-making of African American literature. Thus, result mobilizes an idea of race as a stable and transhistorical category of that is lived an experiential and collective way of being mediated through a collective feeling of great suffering.8 Herein lies origins of this written tradition.Gates's reading of talking book adequately memorializes a presumed misunderstanding of sight and act of reading but is too simplistic. Maybe Gronniosaw suffers when book does not speak, but I question whether his suffering births a cohesive racial identity, literary category, or even if this scene marks a desire for actual book learning.9 Moreover, his narrative seemingly sidesteps scholarly need to (im) properly racialize him in order to note profundity of his religious experiences. It is at this point in classroom discussions that students begin to ask, If it's not about race, then what? But answer-Christian faith-is quite clear to these early writers, such Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Phillis Wheatley. Because race does not function a stable or transhistorical category of identity in early African American literature (though this fact should not deny an emergent racial collectivity), faith makes real their stories and their self-making.I argue for a revision of Gates's reading by way of an examination of minister Marrant's deployment of trope of talking book in his 1785 Narrative. …

Race and the Mind/Body Problem

When I was asked to respond to Gabrielle Foreman's essay, my first thought was, Oh no, here we go again. This was neither condemnation of nor boredom with the topic of scholarly subjectivity, but a testimony to its endurance as an issue and my failure to come up with any satisfactory answers in the years since Nellie McKay's or Barbara Christian's prophetic call(s). Over the years I have faced this conundrum from various positionali-ties: as a graduate student during the backlash over affirmative action in the early 1990s, as a faculty member when the only other black woman in the department retired without a replacement, and now as department chair who, in a climate of shrinking resources, struggles to make the case for a second (!) African Americanist while the intellectual ground justifying such a hire crumbles beneath my feet. Here we go. Again. Foreman aptly approaches the difficulty as both an intellectual and an institutional problem--in other words, a mind/body problem. Part of the founding intellectual premise of African American studies was the need to redress the underrepresentation of African Americans within academia. While this need was often couched in political terms, it was intellectually necessary to diversify the curriculum and the underlying methodologies of the disciplines. The institutional underrepresentation still exists; however, the intellectual ground has shifted, creating a mind/body split between intellect (conceived as an interior, ahistorical function of pure reason) and representation (viewed as an exterior expression of historically, culturally, and socially specific bodies). Foreman referenced, correctly, the dearth of black participation in the Editing Early African American Literature conference in Toronto in 2012. (1) Interestingly, the conference program staged the approach to this vital subject as a series of (rhetorical) questions: What is an African American Book? Who is an African American Author? Who is an African American Reader? (DeLombard, Warren, and Chaldcalakal) The riddle-like nature of these questions stems from the instability of the common signifier: African American. Thus, our inability to answer definitively the implied question--who is an African American?--becomes tacit proof of post-racialization; mind (ahistorical intellect) trumps body (historical representation). A similar problem of (absent) bodies occurred at the 2013 American Literature Association Conference, where one panel, New Paradigms for African American Literary Study, was composed of three non-black men and one white woman. On the one hand this is, indeed, a new paradigm and a sign of progress. After all, wasn't the goal of black studies to make the case for the importance of African American subjects for all scholars? Shouldn't we be ecstatic that our non-African American colleagues want to work in the field? Isn't the presence of non-black scholars on panels, at conferences, and in anthologies about African American literature the ultimate sign that the work of the Barbara Christians and Nellie McKays has made its mark? Yes. And no. The reality is that academic panels, conferences, and published volumes (2) reflect the institutional inequities in academic departments where black scholars are often overcommitted with service responsibilities or lack travel funding to be present and accounted for. …

Frances Smith Foster: A Select Bibliography

In this final tribute, we offer a sampling of Frances Smith Foster's published work. Because the SSAWW Lifetime Achievement Medal recognizes the recipient's support of and impact upon the work of others as well as her own scholarly contributions, we have also included a short selection of volumes published by former students of Foster whose work she advised or supervised. BOOKS AUTHORED 'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Teaching with The Norton Anthology of African American Literature: A Guide for Instructors. New York: Norton, 1997. With Helen R. Houston. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives. Westport: Greenwood, 1979; znd ed. Madison: U of Wisconsin P. 1994. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. BOOKS EDITED Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies. New York: Feminist, 2010. Ed. with Stanlie M. James and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Love and Marriage in African America: An Anthology. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2007. La Familia en Africa y la Diaspora Africana: Estudio Multidisciplinar/Family in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Salamanca: Almar-Anglistica, 2004. Ed. with Olga Barrios. Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley. Chicago: R. R. Donnelley, 1998; Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. The Concise Oxford Companion to African American New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Ed. with William L. Andrews and Trudier Harris. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2001. Ed. with Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American New York: Norton, 1997. Ed. with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nellie Y. McKay, et al; 2nd ed., 2004; 3rd ed. in press. The Oxford Companion to African American New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Ed. with William L. Andrews and Trudier Harris. Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W Harper. Boston: Beacon, 1994; 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon, 1995. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. New York: Feminist, 1990. ESSAYS Unraveling the Strands. Part of Hidden in Plain Sight: Colloquy with Annette Gordon-Reed on The Hemingses of Monticello. American Literature 47.2 (2012): 449-51. Anyway, We Certainly Don't Want to Be Lumped in with Black Studies!' True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School. Ed. Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 2011. 219-34. Genealogies of Our Concerns, (African) American Print Culture, and Transcending Tough Times. American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 368-80. Looking Back Is Tricky Business ...) Narrative 18.1 (2010): 19-28. Mammy's Daughters; Or, the DNA of a Feminist Sexual Ethics. Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies. Ed. Bernadette J. Brooten. New York: Palgrave, 2010. 267-86. Ports of Call, Pulpits of Consultation: Rethinking the Origins of African American Literature. A Companion to African American Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 45-58. With Kim D. Green. Race and Literary Politics. A Companion to American Literature and Culture. Ed. Paul Lauter. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 316-27. With Cassandra Jackson. Early African American Women's Literature. The Cambridge Guide to African American Women's Ed. Angclyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009, 15-31. With LaRose Davis. Afterwords; Or, Whistling 'Dixie' on the Front Porch of My Southern Home. Southern Quarterly 45. …

Staged Bodies: Passing, Performance, and Masquerade in Charles W. Chesnutt’s &lt;i&gt;The House Behind the Cedars&lt;/i&gt;

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., claims that “one of the ironies” of the New Negro Movement “is that words, not the tactics of visual representation, were the tools blacks used to assert their self-image” (xliv). While we can point to exceptions that complicate this observation—James Van Der Zee’s photography, Archibald Motley’s paintings, or W. E. B. Du Bois’s photographic collection Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U. S. A. (1900)— Gates identifies an important gap in the history of African American selfimaging. What happens, however, when we open up Gates’s terms to examine how authors using words might simultaneously employ “tactics of visual representation”? These written and visual representational modes are not easily or neatly separated. In fact, early African American literature regularly combined them. The first African American novelists creatively integrated these methods of representation in their texts, strategically dismantling racist visual iconography by developing an ocular language that invited consumers of their fiction not just to read their words but also to see the images those words conjured. This practice became even more prevalent during the New Negro Movement, particularly in passing novels that sought to embody mixed-race characters for socio-political purposes. This essay thus revises Gates’s claim that “until the 1920s there was virtually no black counterpoint to the hegemony of racist visual images that dominated the popular arts and more subtly infiltrated the fine arts” (xliv). Authors of the written word were developing a specific language, a visual discourse that sought to topple the hegemony Gates describes. Visual discourse builds on the practice of “word painting” that dominated US realist writing by the turn of the twentieth century. Edith Wharton identifies word painting as highly descriptive language that “help[s] to make [a character] bodily visible” (485). While not the only tool available for “conferring visibility” to “the reader’s mind” (484), the artist’s brush, when applied to the written page, aided realists who sought to convey an “acute visibility which makes the [reader’s] heart throb and the marrow tingle at the flesh-and-blood aliveness” of literary characters (481). Word

Representing the race: a new political history of African American literature

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a New Political History of African American Literature 1 The Politics of Early African American Literature 2 The Intellectual Culture of Racial Politics after Slavery 3 New Negro Politics from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance 4 The Geopolitics of African American Autobiography between the World Wars 5 Copyright Law, Free Speech, and the Transformative Value of African American Literature 6 The Political Audacity of Barack Obama's Literature Epilogue: The Politics of African American Literature after Obama Notes Index About the Author

Frances Whipple, Elleanor Eldridge, and the Politics of Interracial Collaboration

This essay examines the second of two virtually unknown texts coauthored by Frances Whipple (Green McDougal) and Elleanor Eldridge, both of Providence, Rhode Island: Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (1838) and Elleanor's Second Book (1839). Whereas the Memoirs exclusively chronicles Eldridge's life and misfortunes, Elleanor's Second Book contains only an abbreviated biography of its eponymous African and indigenous heroine. After its biographical opening section, Elleanor's Second Book shifts to several stories about white women representing a variety of class locations. These characters are juxtaposed against the “colored” Eldridge, as Whipple, Eldridge's de facto amanuensis, conforms to Rhode Island's rhetorical institutionalization of a black-white racial binary. This label and Whipple's condescending and unguarded use of racist terminology and stereotypes of black and indigenous people expose the differences that the two women bring to their collaborative project. Whipple's ambivalence about her literary subject becomes apparent in the descriptions of Eldridge she offers through the narrator and white female characters in Elleanor's Second Book. The essay argues that despite the rhetorical failures in both texts that ensue from Whipple's complicated race politics, contemporary scholars of American literature should not ignore the biographies' sociopolitical and economic underpinnings, as the latter provide crucial insights into the study of early African American literature as well as early U.S. women's literature.

African American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century South

Two recent monographs argue that nineteenthand early twentieth-century African American literature works to represent and imagine black identity in ways heretofore unrecognized. In Fugitive Vi sion, Michael Chaney considers how antebellum African American au thors from the South—who had been or had remained enslaved—-turn to the visual to ruminate on the relationship of racial blackness to sen sory knowledge. Sherita L. Johnson's Black Women in New South Lit erature and Culture attends to the overlooked significance of regional identity in literature by and about southern black women. Chaney and Johnson offer compelling arguments for renewed attention to the rela tionship of African American literature to the South. In six chapters along with an introduction and a brief conclusion, Chaney demonstrates that black authors and artists contend with rep resentations of slavery common to the antebellum period by combining

Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early African American Literature; Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography; Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760–1835

Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early African American Literature; Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography; Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760–1835

“To Refute Mr. Jefferson’s Arguments Respecting Us”: Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, and the Politics of Early African American Literature

“To Refute Mr. Jefferson’s Arguments Respecting Us”Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, and the Politics of Early African American Literature Gene Andrew Jarrett (bio) Describing the political genealogy of early African American literature potentially opens the proverbial can of worms, if a 2006 roundtable published in Early American Literature is any indication. Titled “Historicizing Race in Early American Studies,” and featuring the eminent scholars Joanna Brooks, Philip Gould, and David Kazanjian, the roundtable reveals the fault lines of disagreement not only on how to historicize race but also on how to historicize its politics. The journal’s current editor, Sandra M. Gustafson, had invited the roundtable scholars “to think about the theoretical implications of their work for an understanding of ‘race’ in the early period” (310). In response, the scholars outline their methodologies of race and literary history by reciting and elaborating the arguments of their books, all published in 2003: Brooks’s American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures, Gould’s Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, and Kazanjian’s The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America. To begin the debate, Brooks argues that the philosophical and practical impact of race on oppressed groups was quite evident. The very racial “concepts of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Indianness’ were essentially Euro-American inventions imposed upon people of color of various African and indigenous American ethnic affiliations to advance the economic and political dominance of whites” (315). Gould does not necessarily underplay this racial impact, but he does suggest that the meaning of race itself demonstrates a “far greater elasticity” than what Brooks permits (323). Interpreting “race in context of the historical formations of sentimentalism and capitalism,” [End Page 291] Gould considers the mutual influence of transnational and transgeneric literatures, on the one hand, and “ideologies of race that are themselves unstable,” on the other (322).1 Above all, the particular studies of Brooks and Gould proceed from different assumptions on the ideological construction and material tractability of race in early America. Measuring the tractability of race leads to a submerged, though no less important, disagreement between Brooks and Gould on the criteria by which we should assemble a literary archive of early America. Should we examine the lives and literatures of the alleged perpetrators of racial discrimination, or those of the alleged victims, in order to historicize race? What is at stake in studying white imaginations of race as opposed to black experiences of racism? Gould rightly points out that cataloging the archive merely in these terms neglects the ideological infection of racism across the minds and actions of both whites and blacks. Yet Brooks also correctly asserts that reducing racism to merely an ideology threatens to ignore its practical or material devastation of minority groups. Despite their different approaches to historicizing race, Brooks and Gould agree that the racial paradigm of human difference stood at the center of how the authors and subjects of primary texts negotiated, accumulated, and allocated political power in the early republic. Gould senses this agreement when he asks, “What does it mean, for example, to say that [Phillis] Wheatley is ‘free’? Or that she emancipates herself as a writer? The field is still in the process of engaging such questions. I would argue, as I think Brooks does, that addressing such questions necessitates thinking through the different registers on which the very terms ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’ signified” (325). Just as relevant, we must study how early American literature served as the site of such thought, in which race, nature, slavery, politics, emancipation, liberty, and citizenship are defined in their contemporary terms, not retrofitted from our own. If we accept this precaution, how do we establish the political value and genealogy of early African American literature? In this essay, I argue that before we can ascertain that early African American literature is political insofar that it has confronted racism, and before we can reach conclusions on the political motives, effects, and success of this corpus of texts, we should take a closer look at how the notions of literature and politics themselves resonated in early American debates. These debates involved white and...

A hairdresser's experience in high life

This book offers a firsthand account of work, race, and femininity. Here is the first fully annotated edition of a landmark in early African American literature - Eliza Potter's 1859 autobiography, A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life. Potter was a freeborn black woman who, as a hairdresser, was in a unique position to hear about, receive confidences from, and observe wealthy white women - and she recorded it all in a revelatory book that delighted Cincinnati's gossip columnists at the time. But more important is Potter's portrait of herself as a wage-earning woman, proud of her work, who earned high pay and accumulated quite a bit of money as one of the nation's earliest 'beauticians' at a time when most black women worked at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Because her work offered insights into the private lives of elite white women, Potter carved out a literary space that featured a black working woman at the center, rather than at the margins, of the era's transformations in gender, race, and class structure. Xiomara Santamarina provides an insightful introduction to this edition that includes newly discovered information about Potter, discusses the author's strong satirical voice and proud working-class status, and places the narrative in the context of nineteenth-century literature and history.